Page 8 of My Christmas Alien Mate

I noticed more sweat dripping down my back, was it that hot in here? I looked at the fireplace, but it wasn't burning full blast any longer. Why was I so hot?

"Are you alright?" Galexor asked, "You look hot."

For a moment, I allowed myself the illusion that he calledmehot instead of inquiring about the state of my body, and I liked it. I wanted to look hot for him. Another inappropriate giggle escaped me, but thankfully, I turned that childish behavior down. "I'm feeling hot. Is it hot in here?"

"I wouldn't know. Unless the temperature change is significant, we don't experience hot or cold," he explained almost apologetically.

He moved his hand in a wave-like gesture, and a screen appeared out of thin air between him and me with glowing, indecipherable symbols on it.

"Wow!" I exclaimed fascinated.

"The temperature doesn't seem to have changed much since we entered," he explained and moved his finger up and down the screen, and I realized that he was looking at some kind of computer or tablet and couldn't help but be impressed. The fingers of the programmer inside me itched to get my hands on this screen and test it out.

He wrinkled his brow. "Yours has though. It's slightly higher than it was before."

Automatically, my hand moved up to my forehead and found it burning hot. My little dip in the lake seemed to have made me feverish. As if on cue, I sneezed a few times.

"Are you okay?" Galexor asked again, shrinking back in his chair as if nobody had ever sneezed around him before or as if he was the world's biggest germaphobe.

My ears rang from sneezing. "I should probably take an aspirin, just in case." Again I tried to get up but fell back on my ass.

"I'll get it. Where is it and what does it look like?" he offered.

"In the medicine cabinet, in the bathroom." With a start, I realized he probably had no idea what I was talking about and added, "You can open the mirror on the wall, they're inside there. A clear bottle with white pills. It says aspirin right on it."

I wanted to smack my head, because he probably couldn't read our language either, which reminded me. "How come we can talk like this? When you first spoke, it was all gibberish."

He tapped the side of his head. "A cerebral implant. It allows me to communicate in any chosen language, and also to read and write it."

"Whoa, that's awesome," I gushed, because a friend of mine had tried to develop something similar and failed badly. Not acerebral implant, or anything like that, just a simple app that would have allowed the users to do what Galexor had described.

Galexor moved into the bathroom as if he knew my place inside and out already, which was when I noticed the towel around my hair that he must have gotten from the bathroom and placed around my head while I was out.

Gratefulness toward the big alien rushed up inside me. I couldn't remember the last time anyone had done something thoughtful like this for me. It had been months, ever since Grampa died.No, I chided myself as tears welled, I would not think about him right now.

I listened to the telltale signs of Galexor opening and closing the cabinets, and seconds later, he returned shaking the aspirin bottle. "How do they come out?"

I stretched out my hand, and he handed the bottle over so I could show him how to open it. For good measure, I took two, flushing them down with the now-cooled concoction.

"You live here alone?" He observed more than asked.

"Yeah, it used to be me and my grampa, but he died… a few months ago."

"I'm sorry," he offered, and I gave him a wry smile, unsure of how to reply, just like I had been with the hundreds of otherI'm sorriesI had been given over the past few months.

"It's hard," I heard myself say, acknowledging the truth of it to somebody else for the first time since Grampa left me.

When Galexor didn't respond, I added, "It was just him and me for so long that I don't know how to… move on."

"What about your parents?" He settled back down on the other couch after giving the recliner a glare.

"My parents died in a car crash when I was little. It's only been Grampa and me for as long as I can remember."

We fell silent for a moment before he said, "You live far from the other indig—humans. I didn't know anybody was out here. I thought this area was uninhabited."

"It's just me for miles. I turned off the lights to see the stars better," I explained, and for some reason, utterly unworried about admitting this to a strange man. If he had nefarious intentions, he would have let me drown.

"Doesn't that get lonely?"

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